


Sunday Dinner

by PetrichorPerfume



Series: Shenanigans [126]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Men of Letters Bunker, Neighbors, Sunday Dinner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 02:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2411156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrichorPerfume/pseuds/PetrichorPerfume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mr. Aldric Elstrom had moved to Kansas to live out his retirement in relative peace and quiet. </p>
<p>All of those plans went up in smoke the day Michael's family moved into the previously abandoned bunker across the street and invited him to Sunday dinner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunday Dinner

Mr. Aldric Elstrom had moved to Kansas to get away. Lebanon was just a tiny little hick town in Middle of Nowhere, USA. It was as far away from the rest of the world that he could possibly get without digging a hole to the center of the Earth and letting the ground swallow him whole.

 

He was content in his solitude and perfectly happy to watch as the eyesore across the street slowly fell into ruin. There was something poetic about such an imposing structure being left to rot in the barren farmlands of rural Kansas.

 

Sometimes he liked to sit on his front porch, little wisps of smoking curling in the air around him from the cigar dangled loosely between his fingers, and speculate about the secrets locked behind its rusty doors. In his more fanciful moments, he liked to entertain the idea that there had been aliens living there at one point, government experiments, perhaps, or actual spacemen hiding in plain sight in a base at the exact center of the United States. Other times, when the gears of his mind clicked a little less capriciously, he concluded that the building was in fact a holdover from the Atomic Era.

 

All of those theories were blown clear out of the water when he saw three young men laughing and smiling in front of the weather-worn stairs of the building across the street. His dreams of living a nice, quiet life independent of the rest of the world quickly went up in smoke. His worst nightmare had come true; he had _neighbors_.

 

It slowly became apparent that the folks who lived across the way weren’t just _any_ neighbors, either. It wasn’t that they were loud or moderately disruptive. No, it was, in fact, nearly the opposite. Mr. Elstrom’s neighbors were disturbingly quiet and mind-numbingly, spectacularly, _stunningly_ disruptive.

 

They painted their residence all sorts of hideously, nauseatingly dull colors. They painted sighs atop their door saying, ‘Lucifer Lives’ in all-black caps against a psychedelic background followed by, ‘Stop defacing our property, Lulu,’ in inexplicably neat script followed by a rather rude drawing of a certain aspect of male anatomy followed by, ‘I’m sorry for my brothers. Dinner this Sunday?’

 

Needless to say, Mr. Elstrom didn’t go to dinner that Sunday. He ate a nice bowl of rice instead and sat by the window for a while, fully expecting someone to come out and change the sign and debating whether or not to inform the authorities. What he saw instead was enough to make him question whether his life of solitude had truly started to go to his head. One of the men – he wasn’t quite sure which, as they were all devastatingly handsome and he’d never wanted to be outside when they were around long enough to catch any of their names – appeared out of thin air and slid a tuple-ware full of what he could only assume was food into his mailbox.

 

When Mr. Elstrom finally gathered the courage to sneak outside and retrieve the food, it was already dark. A closer inspection under his favorite lamp in the kitchen revealed the tuple-ware to be full of individual servings of meatloaf, roasted lamb, baked chicken, lasagna, sautéed vegetables, a handful of berries, and a slice of pie. That night, Mr. Elstrom feasted.

 

The gifts didn’t stop after that, though. Every few days he’d find a box of gourmet chocolates or a knitted sweater that was softer than any hand-made sweater had the right to be or a delicious warm meal. The invitations to Sunday dinner didn’t cease, either, and only became more and more insistent as the months wore on into winter. He finally broke on the day that the sign above the door read, ‘Dinner. Sunday. Five P.M. Be there or be square.’

 

He rolled his eyes, put on a suit, and trudged across the street at 4:59.

 

“Ah! You came! I knew that would work. Now I can buy that new electric massager I’ve been wanting. Can you believe that they all bet me five dollars it wouldn’t? Their loss. Okay, so, rules! No saying Grace, or Lulu will cry. No swearing, no taking the Lord’s name in vain, and no blasphemy, or Mika will cry. No eating pie in front of Dean, or else he’ll cry. Don’t mention bees unless you want to eat with ten thousand of them. No singing Heat of the Moment, or else Sam and Gabriel will start to scream. Oh, and try to remember I’m the normal one. My name is Adam and I’m the one who knows karate if you feel like forgetting. Any questions?”


End file.
